SEMrush Review, Alternatives and Free Trial Account

When we talk about ‘Search’, we predominantly talk about Google Search results. Whether it is organic or paid search, companies both big and small are busy trying to take the first few slots of the Google search result. That is how they can pull the massive traffic to their website and landing pages. This post is about SEMrush review and it’s alternatives.

Traffic pulling and having a successful conversion rate is the first and only priority for any and every company. Mostly, marketers indulge in Search Marketing. Real time analysis and competitor monitoring acts as a gateway to ways in which more traffic can be diverted to your own website through search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others.

Search Marketing is a broad term that branches out into SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing). While SEO is mostly about acquiring users based on the visibility on search results, SEM is more about pulling traffic through ads placed on search result pages.

In this article, I will discuss about this SEM tool that can be used to research competitors’ keywords – SEMrush, which I have used in many projects. Writing is no more about just putting up what your readers love but also about searching and finding what readers have been searching and putting them into post, so, that it can drive relevant traffic from search engine. Or, putting it the other way, using these keywords, you can drive highly relevant traffic through ads in search engine.

Way back in 2011, Techcrunch had reported that Yelp.com gets around 75% of its traffic from Google, out of which 50% people start searching on Google and eventually reach Yelp’s page, while 25% search using ‘yelp’ keyword in the search.

Before I talk about how SEMrush aids to organic SEO, let us have a quick overview of how SEM is different from SEO.

SEM vs. SEO

SEO and SEM go hand in hand but are very much different from each other. Search Engine Optimization is a technique by which you improve your search rank and drive traffic to your website. Search Engine Marketing is rather a broader term that encompasses SEO as well. It includes paid or sponsored advertisement, ensuring more visibility of your website.

Arguments on which is better than the other are in galleons. Organic SEO is definitely cost effective since it does not incur any spending. It relies more on the content quality and the way you use social media platforms to market your website.

SEM includes various strategies like Paid Per Click (PPC). This is a good way to obtain immediate visibility on the search engines. The traffic is essentially targeted. Most clicks ultimately reach the end of the marketing funnel: conversion. This is mostly carried out through effective landing pages in online ads.

It is entirely need-oriented decision for a company to address any of the two. However, having said that, relying on PPC on a long-term basis might be hazardous idea because, without organic SEO, it is difficult to stay afloat. Needless to say, traffic coming from organic SEO has a better ROI till date.

SEMrush is a wonderful tool that has an impressive updated database. It is a highly competent tool that engages with SEO in a way that adds value to your marketing strategies. Here’s few ways in which SEMrush helps in organic SEO–

It easily helps in finding the relevant keywords. SEMrush effectively gives an idea of which keyword has had gains or loses, which keyword has risen or fallen in the specific time frame.

Competitive analysis is much easier with SEMrush. You can have a clear view of where you rank, what is your position and the same in terms of your competitors.

It helps in understanding the growth of your competitor in organic search, and also shows you how you rank, what you need to pay and how good is your search volume.

Review of Organic Research

Finding the right keyword is extremely essential when you are trying to reach your target audience via organic search engines. This feature helps you dig out the keywords that can help you increase and improve your search engine ranking. Along with that, you can also know the content strategy your competitor might be using to drive the organic traffic to their website.

Know the best keywords your competitors are using

Discover other organic competitors that you did not list down earlier

SEMrush Competitive Positioning Map shows you immediately where you rank in comparison to all your competitors. You can have a direct comparison in terms of the top 20 in Google’s or Bing’s search results.

The SEMrush Position change Report gives you a detailed knowledge of the domain position change of your competitors as well as yours. In this way, you can have a fair understanding of where your strategies are lagging or what is working in your favour.

Review of Advertising Research

SEMrush Advertising feature helps in achieving the maximum ROI from your PPC campaigns. SEMrush gives you valuable data on your competitors’ PPC campaigns, like keywords, budget, campaign activities, and so on. Using these data, you can improve your own campaign and get the maximum ROI possible out of it. This not only helps you avoid certain mistakes, it also saves your time and cost. You cease from burning money in a campaign that gives no or least return.

Get a close-up of your competitors’ ad budget and strategies

Scrutinize your rivals’ Ad copies and keywords

Unveil new competitors in AdWords and Bing Ads

Analyse keywords and ad texts in around 26 regions and 16 languages.

Get access to the top ranking keywords and the best ones that your competitors are using. Along with that, know how long an ad has been running to have a better overview of how you are doing.

There is no denial that paid ad is extremely competitive. To out beat your competitors, you have to know who are your major rivals. SEMrush provides a list of domain’s competitors, estimation of keywords and paid traffic, and how much your rival is spending on ads.

If you can attain a clear understanding of your competitors’ PLA strategies, you can easily fine-tune your own Google Shopping techniques.

By generating SEMrush Positions report for a competitors’ domain, you can have a detailed insight on every PLA that pops up for each keyword, the PLA ranking in SERPs, and much more. The PLA Copies Report gives you access to the PLAs that has performed the best for your competitor.

Review of Display Advertising

Google’s display ad network is home to millions of websites. Bidding for impressions in this crowded place is very tough. SEMrush Top 30 report shows the best-performing advertisers’ sites along with their texts, media ads, landing pages and how many ads have been used by them.

With SEMrush Display Advertising data, it is easier for you to analyze your competitors’ ads and other leading ads. You can know how many impressions were given to each of these ads, and what is the display ratio between text ads to media ads. These insights will help you have a detailed knowledge of what works and what doesn’t.

Not only analysis, but SEMrush AdSense Publishers Report enables you to discover where exactly your competitors are advertising. You can confidently pick up the highest performing placement and use it to your favour.

Review of Backlinks Analysis

Performance of link is completely dependent on the quality of backlinks. SEMrush provides the option of conducting deep analysis of which link is pointed towards your website. Effective backlink checker helps you keep a check on incoming links, how authoritative it is, where is it located, and its comparison to competitors’ domains.

After having this report, you can not only improve the quality of backlink you receive but also discover new referral traffic sources.

Know whether the backlinks you have received are genuine or spam

Check for .edu or .gov links so that your website gets a boost in SERPs.

Know from where your competitors are getting their strong backlinks

Know whether the backlinks you have received are from images or texts or forms, and so on

Get the unique IP addresses of your backlinks. Thus, you can know from which location you have been referred.

I personally found this feature quite useful for SEO purpose, because this is the similar feature which we used from Moz, SEOMajestic or Ahrefs.

Keyword Research Review with SEMrush

SEMrush Keyword Research feature gives you tried and tested keywords that can help you in improving your website rank in Google’s and Bing’s top results. It also provides you with the value of these keywords in paid as well as organic search, and which top players are using them in their landing pages. There are ton of useful data outside Google Adwords.

Get a complete list of best, tested and tried keywords

Match keywords as well as phrases. Know about other related keywords

At times only top keywords may not do the trick. Get hold of long-tail keywords which consequently takes up almost 70% of the total search traffic.

Breaking the shackles of languages and regions, explore keywords that are region specific.

Semrush is GDPR compliant and has updated its privacy agreements and DPA to assure that none of the data protection laws gets violated. You can read the details about how to manage your data subjects, the obligation of the data processors and other related queries on their website.

SEMrush Alternatives

SEMrush is definitely a great tool to track your competitors and consequently improve your own SEO ranking. But SEMrush is not the only one in the market. There is a host of SEMrush alternatives available that concentrate on one or more analysis of marketing segments.

Before you decide on SEMrush, I will tell you briefly how this tool is better in comparison to other available alternatives that include, SerpStat, Moz, Keyword Spy, HitTail and Wordtracker.

SEMrush vs. SerpStat

SerpStat is the all-in-one platform for search engine professionals which include complete research of SERP with advanced analytics, keywords grouping by tags, local search, domain-wise traffic distribution, in-depth backlink analysis, competitor backlinks monitoring, with last two years data.

SerpStat keywords research include analysis if all URL, search questions related insights, related and relevant keywords, with adaptive filters.

SerpStat Site audit tool is again a nifty tool using which you can clean-up and optimize your on-page content of the website. It shows more than 35+ different on-page optimization suggestions.

Competitor research includes analysis of all of your competitor domains, identification of leaders in the niche, visibility on keyword trends, keyword map of the competitors can found easily.

So all in all, SerpStat can be a great growth hacking tool for content marketing, SEO, running and optimizing PPC ads.

Update: SerpStat has revised its privacy policy and has made considerable changes to make its platform ready for GDPR. The Serpstat website clearly states ”We never sell personal data and we carry out all processing operations in strict compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”).

SEMrush vs. Moz

Moz is a great SEO tool and has been in the market since 2004. However, with the release of MOZ Analytics seems like it is moving away from SEO, more towards inbound marketing.

For me, SEMrush is a winner if social media reporting and inbound marketing is not your main target.

In about 30 seconds, you are aware where your website ranks with SEMrush

Set-up is minimal to get data with SEMrush where else MOZ is all about plugging in of data and then wait for several weeks

SEMrush provides intuitive and accessible data

It works great for non-technical clients

SEMrush, however, doesn’t have competitor social media analysis unlike MOZ

Moz comes for $99-$499/month while SEMrush Pro begins at $69.95/month.

GDPR update: As a guide to understanding GDPR and Moz compliance with it, they have created a FAQ and published on their website. If you have any queries related to it, you can visit this link and know more about it.

SEMrush vs. Wordtracker

Wordtracker gives you the best suggestions when it comes to keywords for your website. It is not a Business to the Business rated tool but is still highly reliable to hundreds of people. It was only sometime back that Wordtracker bid goodbye to Google AdWords API and implemented SEMrush instead of it. Why they needed SEMrush?

SEMrush provides more competitive data

Each keyword is backed by a long history- how popular it is, who has used it, what is its value, and so on.

SEMrush has a host of data. Unlike Google’s 800 keywords, SEMrush now allows Wordtracker to offer their users upto 1,000 keyword for each search, of course if they are available in the database.

Wordtraker starts at $27/month only.

Keyword Spy vs. SEMrush

Keyword Spy is another SEMrush competitor that does almost the same functions of spying on your competitors. However, Keyword Spy is essentially more costly than SEMrush. although in terms of functionality and database, SEMrush can easily out beat the other.

Also, in various forums, Keyword Spy’s data hasn’t been really appreciated in comparison to SEMrush’s accurate and intuitive data.

Keyword Spy starts at a price of $89.95/month!

SEMrush Pricing Details

After having skimmed through few competitors of SEMrush, it is now time to take a look at the pricing model of this tool. SEMrush is extremely pocket friendly and it provides a FREE TRIAL before you decide to purchase.

Spying on competitors have become the norm these days. Without knowing what and how your competitors are doing, it is difficult for a marketer to decide on a marketing technique that will not only drive traffic but also enable conversion. When it comes to website ranking, only paid ads do not serve the purpose. Although paid ads are a quicker way to come to limelight, organic search results are what actually ensure yours stability in the market. Tools like SEMrush helps in digging out the tiniest information about your competitors and thereby, improve your search ranking considerably.

This tool is worth a try if you are hoping to drive more and more organic traffic to your website. You can also check my earlier post on 40 Awesome SEO Analysis Tools to know more about such tools.

How does SEMrush help in perfecting your SEM? SEMrush is what we call an intelligent tool. It beautifully merges SEO with SEM thus creating best organic search results with high marketing value for your online business to cherish.

Although both SEM & SEO moves together at the same pace; however, there are a number of differences as well between the two. SEO is considered to be such a technique that helps in improving the search rank of the users and for driving the traffic to the website of the user.

Jonathan, when an Internet user searches through Google, then he enters, at that moment, his thoughts in the form of queries. For Google to analyze the query and display the results, there are rankings according to their own algorithms. However, Google also shows users the ads that are of interest related just to the users’ query. These ads at Google are called Adwords and they show an extremely high degree of success because they see ads directly related to the users’ query.

Ankit, you have very nicely explained the difference between SEO and SEM. I understood them to be part of it each other, but never gave it a proper thought. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technique that helps raise up our (search) rank bring more traffic to our website. While Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a larger concept that includes SEO as well. Internet Ads are an important component of SEM.

Hi Ankit, Good article. I just browsed through the website of wordtracker dotcom. I have a few doubts around keywords.What do you mean by long tail key words? Are there different kinds of key words available? Is it the same as key words..? I can think of at least a 100 key words at a given time. How many keywords does wordtracker offer at the rate it charges us at $27.

Hi Ankit! How credible do you think is Alexa? It is one of the oldest, perhaps. And how about SE Rankings, Infinitigraph, Monitor Backlinks and Spyfu? Which is the best to understand the competitor strategy? Thanks.

Hi Ankit! How credible do you think is Alexa? It is one of the oldest, perhaps. And how about SE Rankings, Infinitigraph, Monitor Backlinks and Spyfu? Which is the best to understand the competitor strategy? Thanks.

I have Spyfu; it is great tool, where as recently I have heard a lot SERankings; it will take some time for me to try this tool. Others, I will trying soon. I feel each of the tool; whether free or paid, they have one unique feature; which everyone likes to use.

SEMRush has helped me in driving relevant traffic to my website, with the help of the ads and the keywords in the search engine. It has effectively provided mu website with more visibility. The PPC strategy of SEM has provided my website with immediate visibility on different search engines. The database of this wonderful tool has been impressively updated. SEMRush has provided me with a perfect analysis of the contributions that the different keywords gave to my website.

Ankit, I have recently put up my website and am looking for the right SEO suite to improve the ranking of my website and increase the traffic. I am really confused between SEM rush and Google analytics. I would want to know what are the pros and cons of both the tools and which one is better in which case?